Mount Pleasant Stories: Historical Walking Tours, by Christine Hagemoen
Walking Tour #1:
We had a lot of fun road-testing Christine Hagemoen’s Mount Pleasant Stories: Historical Walking Tours this week. Christine, a researcher and photographer wrote and published her guide—the first of five walking tours in the Mount Pleasant area—last November.
It’s a great mix of old and new photos, extant buildings, missing heritage, history and a few fun facts thrown in.
Deep roots in Mount Pleasant:
Several years ago, Christine was going through the city directories for 1940 and found a listing for her grandmother. It was in a house on Ontario Street, right across the street from where she has lived since 2015. “We were neighbours in Mount Pleasant 75 years apart,” she says. Even more amazing, the early 1900s house and three others just like it, are still there.
We started the tour at Main Street and 13th Avenue. There’s a Save-On-Foods there now, but from 1907 until 1955 there was a car barn that took up the entire block and housed the streetcars. Only the excavation and the retaining wall remain.
The Convent:
Christine’s walk takes you along Main, winds around Quebec Street and puts you outside a former convent on 12th Avenue. “That’s a bit of a mystery,” she says. “The church owns the whole property, but it’s certainly not occupied as a convent anymore.”
Stop 5 is the Wenonah Apartments, a beautifully restored 1912 building with retail on the ground floor and apartments above. The gorgeous stain-glass windows are the work of long-time resident Robert McNutt.
Stop 21 Fun Fact: a covered bandstand stood at the intersection of Main and Kingsway in the early 1900s and hosted the Mount Pleasant Band on Sundays.
Main and Kingsway:
At stop 22, the colourful Triangle Building at Main and Kingsway is now a trendy coffee shop, but it was originally the Wosk Block, built in 1947 and designed by Ross Lort, (the architect behind Casa Mia and the hobbit houses)
Stop 30: The Brewery Creek Building at East Avenue and Scotia Street was built in the early 1900s as a storage cellar for Vancouver Breweries Ltd., and as you can see from the ghost sign, once the home of Fell’s Candy Factory.
Fun Fact: In 1998 a TV production aired on CBC called Brewery Creek. The show followed the lives of the residents for two months, including former resident, singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan.
The City Centre Motel on Main Street opened in 1954, closed last November, and its days are seriously numbered. The name will likely turn up in the marketing materials for a new condo development.
The tour leaves you at Kingsway and 7th Avenue—the first east-west street in Mount Pleasant, and fittingly, at a block of commercial buildings ranging in age from 1892 to 1947.
Mount Pleasant Stories: Historical Walking Tours retails for $14.00 and you can pick up a copy at Pulp Fiction on Main Street, Massey Books on East Georgia or order a signed copy from Christine.
© Eve Lazarus, 2022